Keiji Nakazawa

REVIEW: “Hiroshima: The Autobiography of Barefoot Gen” “Barefoot Gen” Volumes 1 & 10 (c) Keiji Nakazawa. All Rights Reserved Seven-year-old Keiji Nakazawa was on his way to school in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, when he stopped to answer a question from a classmate’s mother. Before he could reply, “a pale light like the flash of a flashbulb camera, white at the center, engulfed me, a great ball of light with yellow and red mixed at its out edge.” The next thing he knew, he was half-buried in rubble with a six-inch nail driven through his cheek. Because he was standing behind a foot-thick concrete wall, Nakazawa survived. The charred body of his friend’s mother lay nearby. The horrors Nakazawa saw in the ruined city, the poverty and suffering he endured in postwar Japan, including discrimination against bomb victims, haunted him […]